Most suitable agile project management tool

Question

I have been working with managing agile teams for quite some time. Now I'm at a company that no matter how hard I push for the fact that face-to-face is the way to go and that excel sheets works to get us going. But the company sees the "burn-down-chart in a webpage" as the main focus. They actually see that and the ability to see and follow the backlog online as the most important thing and we basically can't get going before this is in place. The people involved are actually not that many and they are not spread across multiple offices so I really can't see the need. But I have decided to stop driving myself crazy about this and just bite the bullet.

So I started looking around and gave Pivotal Tracker, Banana Scrum and a few other a try. A mix of them all would probably be my best fit but given the criteria bellow, which would suite me best? I have searched StackOverflow and read up on a few recommendations before posting, but none of them actually fitted all my needs. The MAIN issue is to give people an indication of the workload and future work-load of the dept, but if we are going to start using a management tool it might as well fill a few other requests.

• Ability to run it on an in-house server (since a lot of the systems it should integrate with are not public on the net)
• Ability to integrate it with Bugzilla, preferably two-way
• Ability for external applications (such as websites) to fetch data about backlog and bunrdown-chart
• Ability to handle cross-functional teams (ie we might only have one person on a team with a given ability. Before I used to handle this manually to avoid over allocating this person in a sprint, but if others are to be able to fiddle with the backlog this should preferably be automatically indicated)
• Ability to print index cards
• Virtual white-board
• Ability to set up automatic reports to be mailed
• Long term indication coarse-grained (correct name?) estimation of features done and short term fine grained estimation

UPDATE: Open-Source would be preferable. Jira is nice, but licensing is quite expensive

UPDATE 2012-01-03: I would like to tip about Backlogs for Redmine which adds Scrum facilities to Redmine in a acceptable manner.

Answer 1

JIRA with the GreenHopper plug-in provides most of what you want. As you say, it's not free, but the licensing costs are reasonable. Twenty dollars to get started with 10 users is a sweet deal.

I've used GreenHopper for a few years. We tried Excel spreadsheets beforehand; they sucked. The problem requires a database and better visualization.

On request, we printed off JIRA task cards for a physical taskboard for a few months. But that was silly -- DRY. A projector in the standup room is all you need. Optionally, you can filter tasks to focus on those team member in turn.

Ability to run it on an in-house server (since a lot of the systems it should integrate with are not public on the net)

Yes.

Ability to integrate it with Bugzilla, preferably two-way

Last I checked, it could import Bugzilla issues.

Ability for external applications (such as websites) to fetch data about backlog and bunrdown-chart

Jelly scripts and JQL might help here.

Ability to handle cross-functional teams (ie we might only have one person on a team with a given ability. Before I used to handle this manually to avoid over allocating this person in a sprint, but if others are to be able to fiddle with the backlog this should preferably be automaticly indicated)

Not sure what you're looking for here. You can create custom groups of users. In the basic system, the only indication of over-allocation is a user's total number of hours in a sprint.

Ability to print index cards

We did this. There's a "Print Cards" menu item.

Virtual white-board

There's a task board. No arbitrary drawing surface.

Ability to set up automatic reports to be mailed

Yes, with very fine control of who gets sent what in response to what events. There are several mechanisms, configurable by either administrators, project administrators, or users.

Long term indication coarse-grained (correct name?.. hehe) estimation of features done and short term fine grained estimation

There's an hour-based burndown chart for the short-term of the next sprint, and an issue-based burndown for the long-term.

Answer 2

I used 37 signals' basecamp with much success. I combined this with a 3rd party burndown chart - http://www.burndowngraph.com/.

I managed the backlog offline in a spreadsheet or as a single todo list in the project. Though you could use 2 basecamp projects. One for the current sprint, and one for the backlog. Each Story becomes a todo list, and each task is ...well, a todo item. Hour estimations for tasks go at the end of a todo item in the form "1h" or "1d" or whatever.

The sum of all todo's is your sprint backlog & taskboard in one.

For your integration concerns, they have a wonderful API that lets you do just about anything you want.

It won't print index cards, but if you really need them there's always the API.

Automatic reports, hmmm. I don't think so, but if people are genuinely interested, they should check the project page for updates.

Not sure it would help you with the cross functional team thing, but maybe I don't exactly understand the problem there.

I think that covered all your points (not that basecamp can, but it's close)

It really sounds like you are trying to use this tool to appease management, but still do things your way. Whatever tool you pick won't be completely successful until you and the team embrace it as well.

Best of luck. BTW, I find greenhopper and jira to be complete overkill for small teams.

Answer 3

Pivotal Tracker is a great tool. Unfortunately it's now going paid (not free anymore). Other tools that are pretty solid include: Rally, Version One, Jira (with Greenhopper), AgileZen, AgileBuddy, TinyPM, Aldon Agile Manager, Agile Bench, Scrum Desk, Scrum Ninja to name a few.

Agile tools are being built by the boat load. You may never find the "perfect tool." Period.

I do suggest that you start with a whiteboard, tape, and stickies. At the end of the day, wallboards are KING for Agile.

Answer 4

On my last project I used Pivotal Tracker which was very slick, though you have to accept that it's Pivotal's way or the highway :) Although its no longer free, it is cheap. I haven't tried Mingle, though I hear some good things about it if you're willing to put in the configuration effort, similar to Greenhopper, which is what we've just shifted to using internally.

@Jody - I don't find Jira to be overkill for small teams if you configure it minimally. Even so I can sympathise that Jira/Greenhopper don't 'just work' out of the box, and something like Pivotal Tracker or 37signals BaseCamp may be a better fit.

Answer 5

If you are interested in open source tools, I would suggest to look at the Scrum Open Source Tools Directory But if cost is a problem and you don't have many people in your project, a lot of commercial tools like TinyPM offer free version of their tools for small teams (5 persons in their case I believe)